It was a day of the week, so as usual, I was thinking about how my opinions are better than those of other people and of course zombies.  Ambiguous grammar ftw.  Anyway, here's the part where I link something to pretend that I don't just think this stuff whenever I have more than five seconds.  Liore is an MMO anarchist, supporting all manner of terror and insanity, valuing chaos above order, apparently believing that that is what makes for great events and experiences.  I agree, to an extent.

A freer experience works better in games than in real life.  The consequences of the downsides are smaller.  It is a game and so the potential harm is limited.  Even further, our perception of the experience is different.  If you blew up my house in real life, I'd be rather upset and traumatized.  I'd do all manner of whining to the police and insurance company.  Do it in a game and I mind be upset, but it's also an opportunity to hunt you down and kill you.  Rather than being a disaster, it is an experience and opportunity.  You see, in the virtual world, that stupid cliche about Chinese about characters for crisis and opportunity is actually true (as opposed to being ignorant bullshit that fits well into the "wise old Asian person" stereotype).

There are limits though.  If my virtual house gets blown up every week it will lose the novelty.  Even if I'm playing Blowing Houses Up Online I might not want to have my house blown up every week.

Then there are the assholes who ruin it for everyone else.  They come in two types.  The first type, the obvious type, are the griefers.  They'll kill your quest giver over and over for an hour.  They'll cause content to be tweaked, such as making attacks on quest givers spawn guards, which may or may not help, but the thought is there at least.

The second type is the one that actually gets content removed.  These are the whiny babies.  They think that a zombie invasion is somehow not awesome.  Not a permanent zombie invasion, just a temporary one.  A completely novel event is apparently the end of the world.  They discourage new events and new ideas.

In their minds, the people spreading the plague are not participating in the event.  They aren't players playing the game as intended.  Oh no, they're griefing assholes.  Apparently playing the game in a way that is even the slightest bit disruptive or interesting, is griefing.  Even when it is a one-time event.  Never to be repeated, thanks to the whiny babies.

Protip: if you want me to help you in WoW, run into me at the end of a long, stressful, miserable day.  You don't even need to ask for help, just be in my general proximity and have the slightest interaction and odds are, I'm going to spend an hour or two helping you with something or other.

The first time I found myself flying someone from Undercity to Blackrock Depths on my back, then swimming through lava, so they could make a smoking heart of the mountain.  For good measure we killed the emperor.  This originally was going to be a post of its own, but somehow it turned into a long, boring post that just sounded like me bragging about how great I am (I am pretty great, fyi).

The second time I ran a couple through Blackwing Lair.  It all began as these stories often do: I was selling sulfuron ingots in trade when someone whispered me. Usually these are jackasses saying how they can get them for 10% of what I'm asking, or free, or how people pay them to take them.  Eventually I just started being rude back.  In this case, the person was merely attempting to haggle, but I misread it and responded with "why do I care?"  Noticing my mistake, I send another tell, explaining that I'd misread and asking if we could start over without me being a jerk.  Well next thing you know they're wondering where to get plans for a sulfuron hammer and we're flying to Blackrock Depths.  Maybe I just like going there...

After a brief bar fight we were standing outside, and for reasons that I cannot remember, I decided to run them through BWL.  This took a non-trivial amount of time because strangely-enough, 86 hunters in greens are less effective than 90 paladins in epics.

Once is an accident.  Twice is coincidence.  Should I be expecting enemy action?

I prefer to allow it so that people can say their bit without needing to set up another account.  I don't recall having any problems with anonymous trolls.  But lately I've been getting a lot of spam.  Since posts older than three weeks are automatically moderated, I was catching all of it.  Then this week I saw it get through the filter and into recent posts.

Because of that, I'm turning off anonymous commenting.  I will turn it back on eventually; maybe the filter will have improved by then.  In the meantime, I'm sorry to anyone who cannot comment.

By timing I mean whoever posted most recently.  The reward is getting the sale rather than the later person.  While this is not a black and white concept, I think it can be distinguished from offering a significantly lower price.

For example, person A posts a frostweave bag for 225g.  Person B shows up sometime later and posts a frostweave bag for 224.9599g.  The one copper only has the effect of changing the sorting, without any significant savings to the buyer.

Contrast this with person A posting for 225g and later person B posts for 215g.  10g isn't exactly a game-changing savings, being maybe half a daily quest of gold, but it is not trivial either.  You'd care about 10g but not a value 1/100,000 as large.

Is 1g a significant undercut?  What about 50g, but on a 1500g item?  I acknowledge that this is subjective and relative.  Yet I would still call it real, in the sense that I notice it in both my own behavior and that of other people.  I've bought the item that is 1c more because I think it is ridiculous to reward timing rather than actual savings.  Similarly, when I've seen my items undercut by trivial amounts, they have still sold, yet the competing items remain.  I cannot attribute this to other sorting methods such as time remaining, since items of higher price often bracket my own.

The most incident that inspired this post was the frostweave bags.  I had several up for 225g.  Seeing that they had sold, I went to post more, only to find that there is a bag posted at 219.375g.  The 6g difference in price was ignored for some reason.  Both were very long auctions.  The next highest bags were at a 238g buyout, so the 13g gap there was apparently large enough to discourage moving up further in the price.

Alternatively, someone misread prices and I am reading way too much into this.

I used to have a lot more time to play.  I had all the time in the world for grinds, long quest chains, and travel time.  I saw little problem with it all.

Now I have less time.  Yet I still have the same sense of entitlement that I had when I had more.  That is to say, I think we earn what we can from playing and if we want more, we play more.  If we don't play more, then we shouldn't complain, because we're merely making our own tradeoffs between different aspects of life.

Here I am with less time and the voices in my head scream about irony and being on the other side of the coin.  Yet, I don't care.  What is so ironic?  If I thought I should get as many rewards as I once did, then perhaps I'd be suffering from irony or hypocrisy or some other word that has had its meaning diluted over time.

Instead, I don't care.  I play less because playing and the rewards from it are less valuable to me than what I do with my time elsewhere.  I'm not on the losing side of some cosmic equation; I'm just on a different point on my old equilibrium line.

This isn't to suggest that I'd not want some more rewards.  Maybe a couple bindings of the windseeker could drop the next time I'm in Molten Core.  Maybe the bonus loot option could reward me with something more rewarding than gold.  It would be nice.  However, there is another idea that I have retained: trivialized rewards are trivial.  It is the rarity of the reward or the effort that goes into it that makes it a reward.  Otherwise it's junk food: additive and yet ultimately unsatisfying.  A little more reward would be nice, but I don't expect it, nor do I suffer for lack of it.  Well, maybe the valor points...

Since writing that post about the valor cap being too low I've only capped once.  Since then I've lacked some combination of time and interest.  It's been the one thing that annoyed me, that there was this goal that I could not get to.  There are other goals that I am not reaching, but they are mine and they are long-term.  They do not taunt me every week.  Yet, I must admit that my post was imperfect, but even this annoyance is slowly fading.  Why?  For the same reason any other perception of a reward has changed: I've not cared.  I could hit the cap; I could identify times when I could have gotten many more valor points, yet I did not want the valor points as much as I wanted other rewards in life.  This choice has made all the difference.

I wonder if that is the key to why some people insist that they must have more, see more, be rewarded more: they do not feel that they have chosen a different path, but that they have instead been stuck on one.  Maybe this is a privilege that I've had.  I used to play a lot and now I play less; I can see the choice in how I spend my time.  If I'd never had a lot of time, might I not perceive it as a choice?

Picture yourself in Stormstout Brewery.  You're at the last boss.  First are the pair of big alementals.  Next are the dozen or so little ones with the ranged attacks.

Is your healer getting hit?  Is a DPS or three getting hit?  Does the tank have aggro on only a few mobs with the rest in a large ring around him, just out of range of his AoEs?


This is when line of sight pulling is a wonderful thing.  Aggro the mobs and run to the doorway that you entered through.  Hug the left wall and they'll run up close, all packed in for easy AoE and easy aggro.

My hunter finally got the gear for Pandaria instances, thanks to a vendor.  And so, off he went.  The first tank was a miserable failure of a fail.  The group collapsed.  Next came Gokuu the death knight.

In my drunken stupor I slurred, "Gokuu, if you shtand in the doorway during the boss, you can get all the little alementalsh to run in close."

Strangely, he replied that he'd do that that phase.

"here, if everyone hugsh the left wall, they come close"

He then proceeded to stand too far out.

"iun back more"
"back up"

And lo, did he back up, and drop death and decay right at the corner, so that all the little alementals ran in close and were easily killed with nary a drop of stray ale.

Afterward, perhaps noticing the contrast with the first time we'd done that boss, he typed, "ty for that"

I was happy.  In a random, not only had someone taken advice, he'd recognized that the advice worked.  And then thanked the advice giver.  There is hope!

I sometimes run across these auctions.  They don't make much sense to me.  Are these just generous souls who trade their profits and risk lost deposits to help others get the items?  I doubt this, even if kindness was the answer to last Monday's mystery.

I don't use the mobile armory/AH often.  The UI is not as good as my in-game addons.  It does have the benefit of allowing me to post and buy when I can't play WoW.  It allows me to sell directly from my bank and mail.

I think this may be the cause.  One thing that bugs me is that it doesn't show vendor prices.  This may be the answer to the less-than-vendor selling.  If you can't see the vendor price, you probably won't know you're going under it.  The app will undercut other sellers by default, and the bid is lower than the buyout.  This allows for prices to creep down, below what is theoretically a price floor.

This leads me to a word of advice: don't use the mobile AH to sell if you don't understand the market.  Maybe that's a good rule in general.

Why can't players go into debt?    Obviously we can picture some reasons.

The biggest reason might be the ability to create debt, then delete the character, mailing off whatever item was bought.  This can be fixed by making the item soulbound.  In the case of trade materials, that would have to apply to the crafting results.  Or exclude trade materials since I foresee many problems, both on the technical side and on the player side.

Paying back is tricky too.  What can the game do?  One like EVE could be heartless and tear out your implants and break a clone's kneecaps.  But WoW can't do that.  It can't actively punish failure to repay, which leaves it open to abuse.

Behold: income withholding.  Make the player's gold go negative and future quest rewards, coin, and vendor sales go to the debt.  Despite having less than no gold, players could still make some purchases, such as repairs, though that would add to their debt.  Again, in a game like WoW we can't have a situation where a player cannot repair their armor.

Excessive debt is also a potential issue.  For example, if I bought a 250,000g mount, we all know I'm not paying that off with my main's coin looting and daily quest rewards.  Not for a very long time.  To deal with this, the account's income on that server would be calculated and purchases could not exceed a certain time period's income, perhaps no more than a month.

This creates some potential problems.  Can the income be faked?  The obvious way would be through direct trades of gold.  A trusting guild might trade a lot of gold to someone so they could borrow for a mount, then take it back, so that the players with an income of 100g a day is in debt for the next 2/3 of a year.  Excluding direct gold trades would fix that, but then it blocks players who do a lot of selling through direct trades.  The AH couldn't be excluded, but then the trillion gold gold coin becomes a potential issue, though the resulting gold destruction might discourage that course of action.  Looking at a longer time frame, such as several months, could give an idea of what a player typically takes in, before they thought to cheat the system.  That creates the problem that income isn't stable: in my case I know my income has gone up dramatically in the past few weeks thanks to my enchanter, so I'd appear much poorer than I am.

Ultimately the problem may be that any amount of gold that can be safely loaned is going to be too little to be worth much.  Loaning me a few thousand is a safe bet: I can pay it back in a few days, but in that case, I'd rather just wait a few days and not deal with goblins.  Loaning me the $250,000g for one of those fancy mounts, that could take a long time.  Then what if I quit?  Returning is less interesting if I know I'm going to have a couple hundred thousand debt waiting for me.

All this leads me to this suggestion: make it an RP mechanic.

Allow for small loans, only a few hundred gold.  Stick a one-week timer on them.  After that week, goblins come for you.  Pay up then or you have a difficult boss fight on your hands.  Better hope you're in a raid when it happens, or maybe not!  If you beat them, then the debt is forgiven, though the goblins will refuse to loan you money for a few weeks, since goons aren't free.  If you pay up, then they'll leave you alone and gladly lend you more gold right away, even on the spot.  If you run away, then they get the bank to withhold income until it is paid off, with periodic letters notifying you that you are being watched.

You might have noticed that the first scenario, borrow money, kill goons, is essentially free gold.  That's why it is meant to be a difficult fight, and can appear anywhere, though the timer will be pretty exact.  By that I mean, if you borrow on Monday at 7pm, the goons will show up the next Monday between 7pm and 8pm, so you could plan ahead.  This could be a guild event, or just a way to get people working together, in a capitalistic manner of course: "/2 paying 50g per person for a group to protect me from goons in 15 minutes!  PLEASE!" Borrow 500g, pay 200g to other players, pocket the 300g, and then repeat it a few weeks once the goblins have burned down their banking records.  Or maybe that should be a quest as well, to break in and destroy the evidence.  The criminal implications are endless!

Maybe other people have run into this.  You're fighting a rare spawn, such as the honor-dropping ones in Krasarang Wilds.  You're doing just fine.  Maybe you even have it very low, 5% or less.  Someone flies back and does an invite.

I'm not sure whether to laugh at this or be insulted.

Do they think that I somehow need help?  If I did, I'd get a group.
Do they think I'm stupid enough to let them roll against me when I don't need them?
Do they hope I'll just absent-mindedly click accept?

Whatever it is, they should fuck off.  At the least they shouldn't sigh at me when I refuse the invite.  What's next, demanding half the ore when I get to a node first?

Prismatic shards are on the AH for less than 1g.  There are no blues in Lich King that vendor for less than 1g.  This means that players are taking something for which they can get multiple gold and instead getting less than one.

You might be saying, "But I need shards."  Okay, so then why are they on the AH?  If an enchanter is burning gold for shards for his own enchants, then they won't be on the AH.  Alternatively, if you need shards, buy them on the AH rather than making them.

 Similarly, low-level essences aren't particularly valuable anymore.  Incidentally, this makes them a great way to level enchanting.  Weapons tend to make a lot of essences rather than dusts, so they're also often better to vendor rather than disenchant.

Of course your server might be different.  Maybe you're on an RP server that only uses shards as currency.

You've just posted a few auctions and as you're headed to the mail to empty it out, you see that yellow text: a buyer has been found.  And again.  Next thing you're eagerly anticipating the coming hour when you get to be rich.

This morning I checked the ghost iron dragonlings.  They'd been up in price last night but I'd been undercut since yeterday.  I posted a few more.  A few seconds later it came in, a buyer had been found.  They were too close together to be separate buyers.  I'd put up four.  But there were five sales; one was of the previous day's more expensive ones.  The four or five that someone had posted in the middle were gone too.  That only adds up to ten, but a dozen sound better, so I'll stick with that.

Market manipulation is possible, and I'd hoped that was the case.  If someone had tried to push them up to 400g, I could overprice and still undercut with my supply.  Maybe they'd keep buying them to pull up the price.  I have a lot to sell.  But no; the AH was not cleared, nor did they repost them.  They bought them to keep them.

Thus the mystery, who needs a dozen unique-equipped trinkets?

Earlier I said how I'd liked the Dread Approach bosses in LFR.  Since then I've worked up the courage to go in as a tank.  In its infinite mercy, LFR dropped in in on the last boss.  That platform-switching guy might have been trouble.

It was a fun fight as DPS.  But as a tank?  Boring.  The greatest challenge was figuring out how to tell what is in front of him.  I figured that out.  I spent the rest of the fight wondering if I'd be better off putting the other 'tank' on follow.  It's not as if my prot DPS is anything to write home about, unless you want to send your parents a letter about a joke.

This wasn't even similar to a tank and spank fight.  On those I can at least feel like I could mitigate more damage, maybe deal more to help with an enrage.  There is some optimizing to do.  Here, I had nothing.

Does that make it a bad fight?  Does every single person need to be having fun for it to be a good fight?  What if some are merely slightly bored?  Insufficiently excited?  Despite my dull task, I think it's a good fight.

I finally got into LFR for this.  Well, a second time.  First time I stumbled into an apparent wipe-prone group on the last boss and wasn't in a mood for that.  Surprisingly, not many people drop groups on the last boss to give a random stranger whom they'll never meet a quick one-boss-kill for weekly valor.


I enjoyed all of the fights.  A lot.  Maybe the first a little less.  That was one that gets messed up by LFR, where some mechanics seem neutralized but still happen, and then it's not clear to me what's going on.  Does this shiny circle mean something bad, or should I finish the cast at take a pitiful amount of damage?  Now you might think it is odd for a ret paladin to use the phrase "finish this cast", but that just shows your limited understanding of true skill.

The second boss was plain old fun.  I was never good at mario or other games of quick movement, but I managed and it was a bit of a thrill.  Right!  Left!  Right!  Oops!  Right!  That one cheated and spawned on top of me!  Left!


Then the last boss.  There's a bit to keep track of, but with nice convenient circles for those of us who can only communicate using Venn diagrams.



Overall I thought this section of a raid had a good bit of movement, but it wasn't some sort of absurd, precisely-timed pre-scripted dance,  Rather, it was about keeping track of one's surroundings and responding accordingly.

Behold, The greatest idea ever: The server lies to us about how much health we have.

No longer would healers watch health bars because they would be utterly meaningless.  Healers would instead have to watch the environment.  Estimate people's original health pools, see how much they've been standing in fire, and assume the tank is about to die any second.  Exciting!

You're welcome.

Back in the summer of 2011 I tried to explain the concept of the "sanity deadzone".  In this area possibilities are not entirely unreasonable, but are enough of a stretch as to be unsustainable for the typical player.  This area is bracketed on two sides.  One one side is a really trivial set of expectations, such as "log in" and on the other a blatantly absurd set of expectations "complete every heroic instance in a day. (back when they took well over half an hour)"

In the middle is the area in which we might expect players to complete it, but many will not be able to.  For example, daily quests sound quite reasonable; surely players can log in for a half hour each day to do a bit of crop planting and kill some mogu.  Each day?  But it's still not all that much time, so let's allow each day to stand.  But there are more than just Tillers and Golden Lotus.  There are nice bugs, wind serpents, other pandas, more pandas, fishing, rare fishing, PvP, and of course your daily bonus random heroic loot.  And LFR.  And that's a good thing!  These dailies have become so overused, so common, so numerous and time-consuming, that we'd never expect people to complete them all every day.

But valor...  It is a mere 1000 points per week.  I despise this limit.

On one hand, it is, at 5 valor per daily, a whopping 200 dailies per week, or 28 per day (and 4 extra to finish it off).  Granted, many of those dailies can be as easy as a bit of cooking, but even still, we're looking at 20 or so each day.  That's not reasonable.  And yet, if you're not capping valor, you're slowing yourself down by a lot and that cap is taunting you.  NOOOOOOOOB!

We can hasten this process by doing some randoms.  First of the day is 80 points.  That's 8 dailies worth, and we can wait in the queue while we do dailies.  It's a bonus bonus!  With bonus on top, unless you're a tank or healer in which case your queue is very short and you develop games such as Jump Out the Dalaran Sewer, in which you jump out the sewer in Dalaran while queuing and see if you get in before splattering.  This is why we hate DPS who don't hit ready.  Overall, a single daily random will get you over half the cap.

Throw in a couple LFR.  Those are only once a week, so they can be bunched up in time-rich times of the week, such as weekends and 2am Tuesday morning.  That's another 180 and now we're at 740.  Suddenly we're down to 52 dailies per week or about 7 per day.  And that's where the problem begins.  That's a single faction's hub.  So run your dailies for the rep you need to buy valor gear, but you're going to already be capped on valor.  Wee.  It would be nice if the valor at least showed up as justice points or gold, rather than just vanishing into the nether (and without even the nice letter from the mages who collect such things).  If you do any raiding, then you're going to cap even sooner.

Relative to the gear cost, it gets worse.  Nothing costs less than 1000.  So hop on out and grind for a  week, you have nothing to show for it.  There is the count, the progress, but that's far less satisfying than actually having an item.  Next week you jump on and grind and buy an item, before capping again.  Next week you can cap again and get another piece.  So far we're at two pieces in three weeks.  Next week you can start the cycle over again and in six weeks you'll have two rings, a belt, and some boots.  If you want a chest, head, or legs, you're looking at over two weeks per item.  Good luck in LFR!

So what would I do?

I'd raise the weekly cap to 3000.  Doing all 48 dailies (according to wowhead) would yield a bit over half the weekly cap.  No sane person is going to be doing every single daily.  That means that there is no expectation of capping for a soloist.  Even throwing in a daily heroic won't get you to the cap.  Adding in LFR won't get you there.  The overall effect is to make the cap so high that no reasonable, or even slightly unreasonable, person expects to get to it.  This is liberating.  It removes the point of reference, so that players can choose to get as many points as they want, and no more, without any sense that they are falling short.  On the other hand, for those players who really want an item, they can go for it and get it.  A higher cap allows players to play as they wish, not as an arbitrary round number tells them to.

*something happens*
"..."


Wow, that was informative!  I'm glad someone took the time to deliver that important information and clarification.  Without the triple dot who knows what I'd have done.  After it, I know exactly what is going on.

More seriously, the triple dot is worthless.  Worse than worthless.  It's condescension masquerading as communication.  It's saying "something went wrong, but the thing that went wrong is so blatantly obvious that I won't even say what it was.  Which of course also means that you are a total idiot for not getting it.  And I still won't explain it because you're not worth it."

To be clear, since I've spent much of this post bashing a lack of clarity, I'm not referring to the trailing triple dot, in which a word is followed by three dots.  That's different.  This post is only about the isolated triple dot.

In conclusion, we should put "..." at the same tier of offensiveness as "fuck all ya'lls".

Few things annoy me in games as much as those slopes that are just barely too steep to climb.  Are they there because of bad terrain design?  Is it a wall disguised as terrain?

I greatly dislike it when my character is forced around in a game.  Crowd control is one form.  Stupidity-based trap quests are another (can't I just shoot him now?).  And then there are the slopes.  You can walk for a little while down, and then it gets steep and pulls you.  You backpedal, jump, turn around and run up, crouch, stand, nothing works as the gravity inevitably pulls you downward.  This isn't a part of progress through a map; you can just run back around another way.  It's instead just an irritant.

Not as bad, but still bad, are the map edges.  With plenty of disk space and a desire to create a sense of place, developers like to put things beyond the edges of the map, usually more terrain and maybe some buildings.  The explorer wants to check them out.  If there is a wall, then they can see the wall, think it is lame, but recognize that not every game is Minecraft and so the map must end somewhere.  But the slope... maybe it can be climbed.  At places it can, though not all the way.  So you go up and up and one missed step and you're sliding back down.  Can I go there or not!?

I should be clear, a sufficiently steep slope becomes okay.  A cliff is clearly impassable and does not create this problem.

Are any of you from Alliance side Cho'gall?  Well you're lying, because no one is (Warcraft Census estimates 1:19.7).  That's the problem: when a PvP server becomes seriously unbalanced, it becomes unihabitable for the lower side.  With attrition and transfers it only gets worse.

Thankfully, the PvE problems are reduced thanks to the variety of cross-realm options, though a server-based raiding guild would have problems.  On the other hand, that just makes it easier to get server firsts, so places like that should be attractive to raiding guilds that are competitive but not quite good enough.  However even in an era of dungeon teleports and portals to everywhere, people still need to leave the sanctuaries.  They need to farm materials (though I suppose a cross-realm auction house could do that, but they'd still need gold to buy with).  They'd need to do dailies, both for gold and for reputation.  With the loss of tabards players must do the dailies.

On a highly unbalanced PvP server, going outside is dangerous.  I started on a moderately unbalanced server, Magtheridon (1:3 or 2:3 iirc).  It wasn't so far off that Horde couldn't survive and it did wonders for the battleground queues (they were server-based back then).  Still, it was a problem at times, though I think it made me more aware of my surroundings, or paranoid.  On the other hand, Crimefighter is an asshole who seemingly did nothing but kill my warlock when I was trying to farm abyssals in Silithus.

Closing the server is not an option.  Blizzard won't allow the bad press, even if players would benefit from the merging of the many low population servers.

So why not fix the world problem?  Convert the server to PvE.  Give all Horde characters free transfers to any PvP server and free race changes to Alliance on Cho'gall.

Alliance could safely level up and play out in the world.  Horde could go to another server if they need the PvP so much, though they might miss the lack of balance.  I can't promise it would save the server, but it is a better option than leaving it to stagnate on one side.

This warning does not protect us from anything.  Once upon a time it helped loot get to the right people, preventing accidental pickups.  Because of the two hour trading timer that protection is no longer needed.  When soloing this warning is without purpose.

In the meantime, the BoP warning only harms us.  It takes time.  It distracts.  It can cause you to lose items.

"This item will bind when picked up" was once a useful piece of information.  No longer.

To start, clearly state that there are no reserves in your trade ad.  On the first boss, turn on master looter during the fight.  Don't ninja anything, since that might at least offer some reason for the action, but instead very slowly link items and demand rolls.  Tell people to chill or get lives if they request group loot.  Ignore any claims that people can't ninja thanks to the "able to use" need system.

Be sure use raid warning for normal communication, rather than limiting it to when you need full, immediate attention.

Above all, make sure you treat a 90-filled transmog run of a level 70 raid as if it were extremely serious.

There may still be items that you really want, but for some reason did not reserve.  If these drop and you do not win them, do the following.  First, ask somewhat nicely, but with little punctuation.  When the person opens trade, feel a sense of urgency.  Know this: they are trying to scam you.  For example, if they put the wrong item in, cancel trade and begin to yell at them.  Ignore their absurd claims of "full bags" or "mistakes", because that's just what a bitch would say.  Speaking of which, be sure to call the person a bitch.  Maybe add in other profanity, such as stating that you can't stand this shit or how it is all bullshit.  For the sake of clarity, call them a ninja.

Of course you can't be all talk.  At some point the player with the item you want may finally find it in their bags.  Before that happens you should swear some more and drop the raid.

Finally, be sure to tell them that you're opening a ticket to report them for ninjaing.  Be sure to have screenshots of your earlier conversations, so that the GMs know that you're serious.

A little lowbie looked for group.  RFC!  Ugh.  Or wait, what's this?  Since when are there dogs?  Thus did I realize that patches actually change things.

The Nostalgia Effect
Or lack thereof.  RFC was never the sort of place that I looked back on with fond memories and misty eyes.  It wasn't a particularly great instance in the first place and the Cataclysm tweaking didn't do much for it.  This was an instance with nothing to lose.

Meh + Eh = Meheh?
I don't think it magically turned into a wonderful instance.  It's still not particularly great,  I'd say that's inevitable for very low level instances, but Deadmines somehow managed and still does.  Still, I do think it is better.

In part it may be the graphics.  The NPCs stand out a bit more (or maybe that's just novelty), so it seems like there are actually enemies in there.  This isn't to suggest that the old troggs were sneaky ambushing enemies; they were only invisible by means of being utterly dull.  At first I thought the lava was just a graphical bug, and then I caught the tail end of it and got slightly warm.  I suppose that's... interesting.  At the least it doesn't have much potential to become annoying (unlike other 'interesting' instance mechanics such as speeches and scripted NPC-NPC fights).

A small feature that stood out for me was the presence of the three cages at the end.  In them were three orc scouts, ready to be released.  In other words, it is far less likely that groups will need to do the usual, "I missed a scout, can we get that group over there?  Or you could all drop group.  Thanks."  I'd only needed two of them, which suggests to me that three is redundant and therefore very few people will have trouble doing this in a single run (and next to guaranteed after two).

Story?
I let myself get rushed and didn't quite get the story.  At least not the written part.  But it appeared that evil shamans were doing evil things and a bunch of Horde soldiers got trapped.  One was experimented on and got all big and mean.

It felt like a Cataclysm-themed instance.  That's not to say that it was bad, but it seemed out of place for the current expansion, though fitting well with the Cataclysm leveling (reminded me of Blackrock Caverns).  Being out of place is hardly the worst problem for an instance, and the quests do at least give some indication of being post-Cataclysm (though then we're in the time travel problem, but that's for another day).

Good
That's my assessment: RFC is now a good instance.  Not great, not terrible, but a good instance and much better than what it was.

It is my experience that old content is itself a form of new content.  It's diverse content.  Sick of dailies and LFR?  Here's something else to do.  Thanks to transmog, everything is of the latest tier, of appearance.

That's merely the situation for a normal player.  A nostalgist gets a bonus!  With every expansion there is new content.  But who cares about that?  They do, but I'll explain why later.  First, new content means that there is old content.  Old content that "no one does anymore".  Old, unused, ripe for nostalgia.  Get the clock ticking on forgetting the thousandth wipe and on remembering that first kill.  Ah... that's the stuff.

The new content, thanks to the typical vertical progression systems, means new power.  I couldn't solo Forge of Souls at 80.  But I could at 85.  At 90 it became easy.  New content makes the old content more accessible, at least in terms of how easily the content will kill you.

On the other hand, it reduces the pool of players.  All the people who want loot and rewards are gone off to purpler pastures.  And good riddance!  The people left are fellow nostalgists, a little community of oddities.

Taken together, there is a rolling effect.  Each expansion makes more old content and each time the power level of players increases, so to does the ability of players to run old content.

Spoiler alert: Deathwing dies in Cataclysm.  Then the dragons quit and declare it the age of mortals.

A bit late to the show, aren't they?

I happened to be in Ulduar the other day.  You know how it goes, one minute you're threatening the Golden Lotus NPCs for giving so little rep for each daily, next thing you're in Ulduar.

While I was in there I remembered a little tiny detail from the expansion: we killed Yogg-Saron.  And the Lich King.  And Malygos the Insane Keeper of Magic.  And some mean black dragons.

Anyway, in Ulduar will kill an Old God, restore a bunch of corrupted guardians left by the Titans, and for good measure we're the ones who convince the Titans not to destroy the planet.  Total contribution of the dragons: nothing.

Speaking of killing Old Gods: Ahn'Qiraj.  Somehow I was in there too.  What did the dragons do for us in there?  Well let's see... They held onto the scepter bits, which is nice of them to do.  Except one was slightly off his rocker and gave it to a minnow.  In his defense, we'd been killing him for a while.  They gave us some neat gear in the raid, except we got the bits for it by killing the Qiraji and finally the Old God C'thun.  In other words, they 'helped' by giving us some gear after we'd already killed the threats.

We followed it up by fighting off the Scourge, eventually sending Naxxramas fleeing to Northrend.

Speaking of the Scourge, we killed the Lich King.  The contribution of the dragons was limited to saving Bolvar, because they happened to have not killed him when they strafed the Scourge.  They didn't save us from those Scourge; they were already beaten by the rogue Apothecaries, who we killed.

Oh, but who helped us kill Malygos?  Red dragons!  Aha!  Except the whole problem was that Malygos wasn't retiring, despite already being useless.  Instead he decided to fix the Burning Legion problem by destroying magic, and killing everyone, equivalent to taking a flamethrower to a server to prevent hackers (which I should acknowledge, might work pretty well).  Besides, we took on the blue dragons at the same time as the twilight, while working on the Scourge and Old Gods.  Meanwhile the dragons were busy with their kidnapping and murder and kidnapping and rape.  Productive!

Speaking of terrible black dragons: dragons.  Also, who killed Nefarian and shut down the chromatic dragonflight?  Us.  Contribution of dragons?  Well let's see: one was enslaved and used against us.  Another hid in Blackrock Spire and helped us make a key so we could go to the upper spire and fight bad orcs.  So I guess they helped a little.  The biggest contributors were the ones who died so we could pretend to be black dragons and sneak into Onyxia's lair and kill her, though she was only there because a certain badass scared her away from Stormwind.

While we're in Blackrock Mountain, we're the ones who banished Ragnaros.  Though admittedly, it was us mortals who summoned him in the first place (I'm referring to the dwarf clan wars, not us talking to Domo early and wiping the raid, not that the latter did not also happen).

Outland was pacified entirely by us mortals.  Though I recognize that the dragons' power power and responsibility may be limited to Azeroth, so I won't hold this one against them.  And a blue dragon did help with the Netherdrakes.

Caverns of Time: Infinite Dragonflight beaten with the help of us and the Bronze Dragonflight.

Notice the trend?  The only problems the dragons fix are the ones created by their own existence.  The rest we've been handling just fine on our own.  They should have dug up Deathwing, beaten him, and then all retired almost a decade ago, or longer, depending on whether you're counting World of Warcraft as when mortals first rose to power or if you're counting the Warcraft RTS games.

It's no secret that I didn't like Cataclysm much. As a result, I didn't play it much.  Previously I'd played WoW every month since the fall of 2005.  A month or two after Cata launched, I stopped caring and stopped playing.  I later returned to see what was going on and left again.  About five months ago I started a new character with a few friends and essentially leveled up, ran a few LFR, and then MoP came out and I fled in terror.  All in all, much less exposure and no attachment to anything.  Beside Twilight Highlands, I have no nostalgia, no sense of "I miss doing that; wasn't that neat?"

In other words, Cataclysm essentially does not exist when I look back on WoW.  There is a fuzzy time when I didn't have much fun, and that's about it.  It's like a repressed memory, shut away so as to not ruin the otherwise fun time I had.

I've started running Wrath of the Lich King heroics, particularly the ICC 5-mans (for Quel'Dalar).  These should feel like very old content, yet they do not.  I feel as if I was just in them, as if they were just in the previous expansion.

I wonder if the level structure strengthens this sense of Cataclysm being little more than a big, bad patch.  Typically they've added ten levels, but Cataclysm and MoP only added five; though taken together they're a solid ten.  Add in my lack of raid experience in Cataclysm (LFR barely counts) and the overall effect is that I see MoP as the expansion that came after LK, with Cataclysm just being a patch that added a few instances.

This leads me to a hypothesis: Players who only play for a short time in each expansion will tend to view them as smaller, with less content, and as less substantial, less dramatic a change to the game, than players who play for longer periods.

This would mean that players who play less don't merely get less value by playing less, but also by their perspective being different, so that for the same amount of content, they will view it as less.  Of course if there is less content, then there will be less willingness to pay for the next expansion, as it would appear as just an expensive patch.  I see this in my own behavior, in that I did not want to pay full price for MoP, though half price was sufficient.

I'm sure Blizzard realized this a while ago and it explains a behavior that sometimes confused me: adding new content mid-expansion.  While I understood that they wanted to keep subs going for the money, I did not see the other value: keeping a sub going adds value in the mind of the player.  Not only are they more invested, but they will feel as if they got more out of an expansion.

From this perspective, of keeping subs going having value beyond merely the sub price, it makes a great deal of sense that Blizzard would have absurdly slow daily grinds such as Golden Lotus.  EVen if players complain, merely by playing, they are increasing their sense of value from an expansion and will be more inclined to buy the next box that, from previous experience, they expect will be filled with content.

People tend to dislike change.  I suspect it is because deep down, we all know that change means entropy and the gradual death of the universe, all life, and all meaning.  But what if we don't realize the change happened?

If we don't realize that anything changed, will we get mad?  I doubt it.

This brings me to my paladin. I know something changed from Cataclysm to Mists of Pandaria.  I know this because I logged in the day of the patch and was very confused and a bit annoyed.  Yet now I couldn't quite tell you what changed.  Pressed for details I might cite abilities from Wrath of thew Lich King, thinking that something is similar, though no quite sure what.

In this confusion, in this forgetfulness, I have lost my customary ability to be enraged over what were surely intolerable changes to my chosen class.